The amount of documents containing text has exponentially grown since the advent of computer networking. Individuals and business entities are disseminating more and more information in the form of textual documents via networks such as the Internet. These textual documents may be associated with a myriad of individual and corporate activities including, for example, the sale of goods and services, the reporting of news, and, in general, the sharing of ideas.
Classification of these textual documents by topic, for example, may assist in the archiving, retrieval, and dissemination of the textual documents. In this manner, an interested individual may obtain a copy of a number of textual documents associated with a particular topic. However, classification of textual documents by, for example, their topic is extremely time consuming and cost-ineffective for an individual or business entity even with the assistance of a computing device. In order to classify a textual document, typically an individual reads or reviews the textual document and stores that document in a manner that indicates that the textual document belongs to a particular topic, or a computing system searches for key words within the document to sort that document by topic.
Throughout the drawings, identical reference numbers designate similar, but not necessarily identical, elements.